eDiscovery Managed Review

What This Solves

Large productions create a bandwidth problem. Your firm or legal department may have the expertise to supervise review, but not the capacity to staff it. Hiring and training document reviewers on short notice is expensive, slow, and inconsistent, especially when the data set includes complex technical documents, foreign language materials, or sensitive privilege issues.

Managed review begins after confirming the actual staffing, qualifications, language or technical specialists, platform access and onboarding schedule. The matter plan identifies GDF project management and supervising counsel, who retains final legal decisions. Reviewer availability and the onboarding schedule are confirmed before work begins.

Technology Plus Practitioners

Managed review is not just software access. The market has moved toward recognizing that technology and human judgment need to work together for complex document review to produce defensible results. GDF delivers both.

Confirm the available platform version and features before scope acceptance. Technical flags, queues and draft privilege-log fields assist supervised review; qualified reviewers apply counsel-approved coding and counsel approves privilege assertions, log sufficiency and production decisions.

Review Team Composition and Training

GDF staffs managed review projects with practitioners who have backgrounds in litigation support, legal analysis, and document review. Team size scales with the project: a focused privilege review may involve three to five senior reviewers; a large commercial litigation set covering millions of documents requires structured teams with defined review tiers, team leads, and dedicated QC reviewers.

A managed-review protocol should require matter-specific training before substantive coding begins. That training covers the review protocol, the responsiveness criteria, the privilege grounds specific to the matter, the redaction categories, and the escalation process for complex or sensitive documents. Training completion is documented. Consistency checks run throughout the project to identify drift from the protocol before it affects production readiness.

Privilege Review and Sensitive Document Handling

An inadvertent disclosure can create a privilege dispute. Its effect depends on the governing rules and any applicable court order; counsel determines waiver and recovery steps. GDF organizes the technical review and production record around counsel's privilege decisions.

Privilege reviewers assess attorney-client communications, work product, and dual-purpose documents with reference to the specific matter's privilege grounds and any applicable court orders. The privilege log is built in real time as decisions are made, using fields and descriptions agreed with supervising counsel for the applicable rules or order. Draft entries can record identifiers, date, parties and proposed privilege grounds; counsel approves the assertions and final log. For matters operating under a Rule 502(d) order, The review team follows counsel's written clawback protocol and tracks items identified for potential notice.

Quality Control Through the Review

The QC plan states its review population, sampling method, sample size, selection rationale and correction/escalation thresholds. Record reviewer and category results, meaningful disagreements and protocol changes. A sample is not called statistically representative without its assumptions and limits being established.

A formal pre-production QC review runs before any documents are cleared for export. This final check covers responsiveness coding accuracy, privilege log completeness, redaction accuracy, and any documents flagged for escalation that have not yet been resolved. The pre-production QC findings are documented in the matter record.